I was teaching a class of beginners yesterday how to knit, and when it came to the question about how to count rows in garter stitch, there was a bit of confusion. Counting garter stitch rows is different from counting stockinette stitch rows, because you don't have those nice, easy to find "V"s to count. They get hidden between the ridges of garter stitch, and can be hard to find. Today I want to show you the easy way to count garter stitch rows.

In these first pictures, you can see a swatch of garter stitch, worked in blue. I used a different color for my cast-on for the sake of the tutorial, so you can see the difference between the garter ridges and the cast on edge.

The blue ridges on each side are what we are going to count. On the right side of the work, we can see 5 complete ridges. The ridge from the cast on (in red) does NOT count.

When we look at the back side, we can see another set of 5 ridges (Note: the 5th ridge at the bottom has a row if red running through it from the cast-on. It still counts as a completed ridge, because it was knitted after the cast-on. Normally you wouldn't see that because your work would be all one color). Again, the cast on edge does NOT count.

Now that we know that there are 5 ridges on the right side of our work, and 5 ridges on the wrong side of our work, we can add those 2 numbers together to get our row count. 5+5=10 rows!

Hope this was helpful, if you have any questions, please leave a comment below!Happy Knitting!-Kaity

Thank you so much for this article! I have wondered for far too long how to count these rows; I read this and it immediately clicked 😊. Useful info for sure!

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Karen NYState

1/7/2018 01:15:48 pm

I'm so happy I found this article. Could never figure this one out. The different color cast on was brilliant : ) and the explanation and labels so clear. Thank you for clearing this up for me after all these years.